


Gem Beasts

by Digigal_transbian



Series: Peridot's Gem Incubators [2]
Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Aromantic Peridot (Steven Universe), Asexual Peridot (Steven Universe), Corrupted Gems, Corruption, Gemlings, Gen, Mad Science, Mad Scientist Peridot (Steven Universe), Queerplatonic Lapis Lazuli/Peridot (Steven Universe), Science is about why not
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-05-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:47:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24149209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Digigal_transbian/pseuds/Digigal_transbian
Summary: Peridot ponders the Diamonds' powers and how the corruption worked and gets an idea.
Relationships: Lapis Lazuli & Peridot (Steven Universe)
Series: Peridot's Gem Incubators [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1742695
Comments: 3
Kudos: 26





	1. Corruption Juice

Peridot was ecstatic.

According to all the figures, there's no way the incubator could fail, she invented a way for gems to reproduce without destroying a planet. She's made gem history while fueled by enough caffeine to power a small house for a week.

If she had a heart, it would have failed three hours ago.

But she doesn't have any beating hearts, at least not inside her, so she continues redesigning and adjusting her incubators to be more efficient. The injectors she used for materials were the late Era One models, which are horribly inefficient compared to the sleeker Era Two injectors. Regardless, they're all she has to work with at the moment. She can make do.

When Babydot finishes growing she should have a significantly more efficient way to incubate gems. She'll also have a daughter and after Pumpkin's passing, Peridot has had plenty of time to think about the companionship she wants in life. Romance and Fusion aren't things she really wants. What she has with Lapis Lazuli is neither of those, but still more than just being good friends.

She asked Steven about it sometime after his meltdown occurred and he pointed the green gem to Connie. Connie brought up the term "Queerplatonic", which Peridot felt described her relationship with Lapis perfectly.

A few days after the happy couple left with their incubator, Peridot began to wonder something. Diamond aura caused the corruption, while the essence cured it. On a wide scale, it was a brilliant way to disrupt the rebellion, turning their allies against themselves. White Diamond disrupted their minds, Yellow Diamond disrupted their forms into a lower, but still unusually natural state for them. Blue Diamond turned their emotions inside out and broke them all into confused emotional messes.

Peridot wonders what would have happened if Pink Diamond was involved with the corruption song. Pink Diamond's powers were never very well defined in the empire. Sure, everyone that knew about her knew what she could do, but no one could really define her powers in a simple way. White Diamond ruled minds, and could take over a gem's body easily, spreading herself into any gem she desired. Yellow Diamond was the master of a gem's form, while her Blue counterpart ruled over emotions, able to bring gems to their knees with her aura easily.

From everything Peridot has heard about Pink Diamond, as well as the things she's seen Steven pull off, she figures that Pink had some form of mind powers, something similar but opposite to White.

The corrupted gems had scrambled emotions, distorted forms, and their minds were messy. Steven was apparently able to heal the Nephrite to be somewhat her old self, but unable to verbally communicate. Bismuth explained after the Diamonds took Steven to Homeworld how the three of them were able to temporarily heal the Nephrite to her former self. Yellow returned her body, Blue returned her emotions from their primal state, while Steven restored her mind, partly. When Blue returned her emotions, her mind was stuck in a loop from just before her corruption, it was Steven that brought her back to herself, even if it didn't stick.

"If Blue was able to undo the primal emotional state, then why was Steven able to bring her back to herself, even if temporarily?" Peridot mutters to herself, looking at her Babydot's incubator pod, "White is the one with mind powers, everyone knows that, but there's evidence to support Steven also having some form of mind powers, unbalancing the balanced Diamond Authority."

"There's also evidence that his powers are based on will, compared to mind." Peridot says to the incubator pod, "Some concepts of the human soul divide it into three major parts, mind, will, and emotions, with a body containing it, and the spirit being contained in the soul."

"So what are White and Pink's essences really doing to gem formation? Yellow and Blue are obvious, they give body and emotion respectively, but White and Pink? One of them gives will while the other gives mind. Even White Diamond's gem placement seems to relate to her mind powers. The order of the mind and the chaos of will."

"But maybe there's something more to it all, something that does make it more messy." Peridot says to her gemling in her incubator, not caring that she can't respond, "What if White Diamond's powers are about the Self and Mind, while Steven has Spirit and Will. White's mind gives and takes a gem's identity, while Steven's will moves their hearts. Pink Diamond, Rose Quartz, and Steven always have emphasized finding your own purpose, while White imposed a purpose on everyone. Control versus autonomy, order versus chaos."

"If Pink was involved in the corruption song, she could have erased a gem's memories. Blue set a gem's emotions to a primal, animalistic state, Yellow set their forms to be animalistic, White broke their mental stability, ensuring that they would stay that way regardless, and Pink could have destroyed their memories, stripped them of their true selves, their spirits and wills."

"Without Yellow, the corrupted gems would have looked as they normally would, but would have been scared, confused, and mentally scattered. Without Blue, the gems would have been beastly, confused, and broken. Without White, the corruption song would have caused the primal and beastly corrupted forms to be more stably not who they were before, seems logical enough."

Peridot shakes herself out of her thoughts and returns to her work on making the incubator pods more efficient, but the thoughts of how the corruption was caused never leaves her mind.

☆◇☆

A few weeks later, her mind returns to the corruption powers. Specifically, she thinks about Yellow's role in the corruption.

Every single corrupted Quartz gem took on the same general form, they all looked like oversized dogs, every corrupted Nephrite became a centipede basically, and corrupted Pearls became moths.

Somewhere in the gem coding is a beastial form, hard coded into every single gem type, and Yellow's role in the corruption brought that out. That same coding is used to form gems in kindergartens and her incubators.

Peridot pauses and straightens in front of Pumpkin's grave. That beastial form is present in every gem's coding, including the gems that will come out of her incubators, it has to be. The corrupted gems wouldn't have stabilized into those forms if they weren't. Her eyes turn to the gravestone in front of her. If she can recreate the corruption in a more stable form, could she create pets for gems? They would be companions designed to be able to love and give love, different from how another gem or a gemling could do so, gems that never had the bipedal and sapient that nature could give to them.

If she could do it, she could bring gems a new form of happiness, expand what it means to be a gem. She could create the pets that never die, an eternal companion to love and support, and Babydot could certainly benefit from a playmate for whenever Momidot works. It's the perfect plan.

She wouldn't have to be lonely ever again.

☆◇☆

Armed with a newfound determination, Peridot sets to work on a way to create pet gems.

The first step, finding the essence amounts of the corrupted gems. Peridot pulls her modified gem development simulator that all certified Kindergartner Peridots know how to make out from the pile and begins messing with the essence drops variable. The first thing she tries is lowering the Yellow drops from two to one.

To make a single gem, it takes two drops of essence from each diamond. Her theory is that lower amounts of the essences cause the lower, more primal gem forms to take precedence. Sure enough, when she dials the Yellow Essence down to one, the simulator shows the beastial form of the example Quartz gem.

Excellent.

She dials the Blue Essence down to one immediately after, also giving her the same results, the primal, beastial emotions. Her mad scientist's grin stretches wide across her face, threatening to split it apart. The two drops of White Essence are left alone, she wants the gem beasts to be stable as they are. Leaving the two drops of Pink Essence alone as well to ensure that the gem beasts have a sense of self, Peridot begins calculating the nutrients required to grow these beasts to be both fully sized as well as having a Ruby size for more accessibility.

The figures come out predictably sized, requiring the same amount of nutrients as the more developed gems. She smiles like a mad gem, the recipe for perfectly beastial, perfectly stable, fully functional gem beasts stares directly at her.

However, she soon encounters a dilemma. She doesn't have any gems to experiment this with. While she could use some more of her essence to create her own little gem beast, something inside her decides against it and chooses to go bigger. Sure it might work with a little Peridot gem, and certainly with a Pearl, but there's one type of gem she wants to experiment with creating the most. She punches in the required parameters and takes in the figures on the display in front of her. Her eyes drift over to the vials on the table in front of her as a mad glint sparks in her eyes.

The Diamonds shall be her first test subjects.


	2. Supply Run

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peridot finds a place to set up her beastial Diamond production and gathers some supplies.

If someone were to ask Peridot why she took a walk around town, she would tell you something about sightseeing. In reality, she is trying to find a place to set up her gem beast incubators. The projections place the gem beasts as larger than the gems that made them, Quartz beasts being larger than any fully grown Quartz soldier.

If she wants to try to incubate her own Diamonds, she needs somewhere large enough where the process won't be disturbed. Progress such as this needs no unnecessary hindrances. She also needs somewhere for them to safely form at all, given that Diamonds are already massive in comparison to any other gem.

She also saw what Steven shapeshifted into, deeply buried inside the Pink Essence's coding. Since it was only a case of extreme shapeshifting, there were no scars left behind. If the Diamonds were to have corrupted him, he'd likely still have the spikes and horns, maybe even the tail.

The image of an excited Steven's tail wagging makes her giggle. It's a very fitting look for him, he even has the puppy eyes mastered.

The prospect is endlessly exciting to her, a simple Era Two Peridot revolutionizing what it means to be a Gem and creating a way for children and pets to be formed safely and easily. If only she could just find the space to put them. Current Little Homeworld infrastructure could only handle the Ruby sized gem beasts, any full sized ones could cause mass havoc by just existing peacefully.

Little Homeworld simply isn't large enough for an undertaking like this. She sighs and throws her head back, the small rural area near the lab wouldn't work, too much risk of loss. The little expedition that happened in the Antarctic may have found a city but with how openly freaked out White Diamond was about the city, that's probably an extraordinarily bad idea. Something about ancient organic species and the implications of what their ancient presence on Earth could mean, best to just stay away from the whole continent.

Faintly in the midday sun, she spots something. Her eyes widen immensely. Plenty of open space, practically abandoned, perfect for risky experiments. She can leave Babydot at the barn lab and set some Robonoids to build a new base and containment facility while she harvests old injector parts for her incubators.

Hanging in the sky, barely visible but still plainly there, the moon sits, unaware of what is to come.

☆◇☆

When the warp stream fades, Peridot makes a mad dash to her lab.

For this plan to work, she needs pure carbon, and lots of it. Luckily, Earth is covered in the stuff. She has money from the flower shop she runs in Beach City with Lapis. They decided it would be a good idea to have some kind of human currency with them given that they would be living on earth for the foreseeable future. Lapis handles the storefront while Peridot handles the greenhouse. Currency can be exchanged for goods and services, like paints and meep morp supplies.

Currency can be exchanged for graphite. 

Graphite contains carbon. 

Carbon is what she needs.

She also needs calcium, magnesium, silicon, oxygen, and iron, but the carbon is the most important element she needs to extract. The magnesium can be harvested from some of the plants in her greenhouse, separating water into hydrogen and oxygen is easy enough for a gem of her intellect, and she still has calcium left over from when she made the Pearls their gemling nutrient packs. The silicon and iron will be a bit of a process to get, but it shouldn't be too much trouble. A few bars of steel should do the trick for the iron while giving her extra carbon, leaving her with just the silicon to figure out. 

Carbon makes Diamonds, after all.

☆◇☆

One quick trip to the local art supply store, and roughly one hundred dollars lighter, Peridot returns to the lab with her graphite in tow.

A quick Boogle search and Whamazon purchase later, as well as another stack of cash, and her iron and pure silicon are set to arrive at the barn labs in a week.

She begins setting aside sections of the lab for storing the minerals she needs to be able to even grow these gems.

Carbon for the Diamonds, with Nitrogen for Yellow Diamond, as well as Boron and Hydrogen for Blue Diamond. She makes note to set up a special pressure chamber to induce the deformities that make Pink Diamond.

Magnesium, Iron, and Silicon for her Babydot. She can pull the Oxygen together whenever she needs to, so she marks that off as a nonissue.

Calcium, Magnesium, Iron, and Silicon for the Nephrite gem beast on the side.

Some extra Silicon to the side for the Quartzes. A little Iron to make the Jasper, a dash of Iron and some Transition Metals, plus some mild radiation for the Amethysts, and a few other elements she can scrounge together for experimentation.

She places the Calcium for the Pearls' gemling in their own little section and steps back to look at the work that is soon to begin.

The insane smile slides easily onto her face as her eyes lock on the bars of steel and graphite in the room.

It's time to get to work.

**Author's Note:**

> For the corruption, each Diamond had a specific effect.
> 
> Yellow Diamond caused the warped, beastly forms. Induced Dysmorphia/Dysphoria maybe could be a good real world comparison.
> 
> Blue Diamond caused the rampant, primal emotions. The corrupted gems' emotions were all unstable at the very least. Bipolar Disorder as a real world comparison maybe?
> 
> White Diamond caused the beastly nature to stick, losing themselves and breaking their minds. The broken mind causes no healing to be permanent, though it can be overwritten temporarily if Pink's aura is applied, acting as an artificial stabilization. The healing fades when the influence of the aura is removed. Maybe Schizophrenia could be the real life comparison?
> 
> Pink Diamond could have caused the corrupted gems to forget who they were, breaking their wills and distorting their spirits and sense of true self. Maybe a real life comparison could be something like OSDD/DID, something Dissociative at least?
> 
> I think this could create some really cool Diamond Momswap AUs where the corruption happens differently, and I am certainly going to mess with that in the future.


End file.
